“If we seek,” says Ruskin, “to ascertain the manner in which the story first crystallized into its shape, we shall find ourselves led back generally to one or other of two sources — either to actual historical events, represented by the fancy under figures personifying them, or else to natural phenomena similarly endowed with life by the imaginative power, usually more or less under the influence of terror. […] The poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries do not speak of Snorri, but they refer continually to the “rules of Edda,” and frequently to the obscurity and the conventionality of Eddic phraseology, figures, and art. […] The height of the figure was 1 feet; the pedestal twelve feet high.